Carol Kirkpatrick, possibly the brightest writer I ever met in a writing group (proof positive being her ability to scribble out a pithy, brilliantly crafted story on the spot) had the additional charm of treating me to an oral history of Brooklyn whenever we walked its streets together.  My hope is to charm you with this sample of her writing:

The function of hospitals has changed during recent years.

With uninsured persons using them as their only source of medical care and with medical insurance costs escalating, hospitals have to squeeze money out of the insured any way they can.

The triage nurse is the gatekeeper.  Send the drunks home, the dead to the morgue, and the near-dead to the I.C.U.  The rest are fair game for tests, tests, tests and procedures, procedures, procedures.  That’s what generates the money to keep the hospital running.  If you come in through the E.R. you can now consider yourself a laboratory animal.

The last time I was in the E.R. was for a broken arm.  Having had broken bones before, I knew what the problem was.  You would think the x-rays would define the break clearly, and they could reduce the fracture to set it to heal as nearly as possible to the way nature designed it.  You would think.

What happened was they set it and then rebroke and re-set it three times before they were satisfied.  Was this necessary or desirable?  Not being an orthopedist, I wouldn’t know.  It did eventually heal very well, so they eventually got it right.  I know it was a complicated fracture involving more than one broken bone, but I was in excruciating pain for more than eight hours while they were redesigning my arm.  I could have had more pain killers, but I consider pain information and so chose to go with a bare minimum of medication.  But it all makes you wonder.